I sometimes live on the bleeding edge of technology. Some like to call this being an “early adapter.” Others think I should join a support program with a twelve-step program. My office has a room devoted to hardware and software I’ve bought, tried out, experimented upon, recommended, and sometimes even installed for my consulting company clients, including quite a few law firms.

When I built a new house a few years ago, I just had to investigate the new energy conservation devices, which could lower my utility bills, reduce my “carbon footprint,” and save the world. Likewise, I just had to experiment with design of home theatre and security system wiring, and the home computer network itself. I sometimes chatted about these with others in the neighborhood who were building houses, but didn’t mention one “enhancement” I had secretly worked on.

As the house was being built, I realized it would be more cost efficient to do all the wiring I would ever need, up front, rather than piece-mealing it later. I had been reading about the strides toward creation of working “smart houses” and other Web 3.0 applications, so I decided to make an investment in the future.

I worked with the various vendors installing my alarm system, home theater, cable, phone and other electronic systems, and got them to lay the groundwork for me. Then, being the bleeding edge geek I am, I began my own tinkering, gradually adding new components, as they entered beta stage. Fortunately, one of my clients is an appliance company, so I was able to make some relatively good purchases and get great deals on some important components.

When Thanksgiving came up on my calendar this year, I decided it was time to give the new system a trial run. I really wasn’t ready for a full-blown trial run, but one of my sons knows a lot more about this stuff than I do, so I figured if I got some of the system up and running, he would be in town at Thanksgiving to give me a hand debugging the parts.

This was also going to be the first year with multiple grandchildren, in addition to some of our friends who had become annual Thanksgiving dinner guests. That meant we had to get out the extra leaf for the dining room table, but it really meant the logistics were starting to add up to the point of being almost unmanageable. The question was whether or not I somehow pull off this Web 3.0 Thanksgiving plan in time to really help.

I got out my copy of Microsoft Project and went to work. This had to be a collaborative effort and, fortunately, seemed to be an interesting challenge for the partners in the project. Admittedly, I felt a little like Chevy Chase in one of my favorite movies of the season, Christmas Vacation, trying to pull off wiring the house to win the neighborhood Christmas lighting prize, but eventually, I finished and it was time to send out the invitations.

I decided to start with an old favorite, evite®, so I could at least try to track who would really be coming and send guest updates in a burst. It also helped get a few other issues out of the way early, such as special dietary concerns of some of the guests, coordinating menu items for those who always insist on bringing Aunt Tillie’s famous recipe, etc. I know there are lots of invitation applications out there, but since I’ve used evite® for many events and was familiar with the foibles and periodic “surprises” as it continues to develop, it was an easy choice for alerting guests to “save the date,” and then to harvest the data as we got closer to The Big Day.

Like many American families, we have established some traditions over the years. That meant timing of various parts of the event had to be precise. With folks arriving at various times, subject to last minute variables, this was always a challenge. I thought it would be interesting to see if a preview of a Web 3.0 world would be any better.

Once the first round of evite® responses started to come back and we had our first estimate of the number of guests and basic menu, I was able to get some online counsel for wine pairings with the various dishes, estimate the number of bottles needed, and place my order. One task completed.

About the time we were building our new house, I happened to read Christoper Allbritton’s story in Popular Mechanics, Control Your Appliances Over The Internet. I tried to remain mindful of Albritton’s reference to the “Terminator” sci-fi movies, and scenario where the fictional military artificial intelligence defense system, Skynet, takes over for humans and then starts to eradicate them as a potential threat. Since my plans didn’t include any air-to-ground missiles, I decided that LG Electronics’ HomNet was a good place to start. After all, their home page says:

LG HomNet is the total home network solution providing a convenient secure, joyful and affluent lifestyle anywhere and anytime with the integration of various digital home appliances. LG HomNet makes the future lifestyle into reality. LG HomNet will usher into a future lifestyle that used to be possible only in the movies and the imagination, together with ultra-high speed Internet, artificial intelligence, and advanced robots.

LG HomNet, a home network system developed by state-of-the-art technologies from LG Electronics!

You will be provided with a new pleasant and convenient digital living culture of the 21st century through intelligent networking of all-digital appliances, agnostic to any wired and wireless communication technology.

We invite you to a new living culture which has been dreamed about by the whole human race.

Aside from the grammatical issues in LG’s statement, and hoping their use of the term “agnostic” was meant to be closer to the original Greek, as opposed to the more recent religious interpretation, who could resist something, which would provide a convenient, secure, joyful, and affluent lifestyle, anywhere and anytime? Not me.

After taking the HomNet Experience online, I started with the refrigerator/server, adding the ovens, microwaves, and some other appliances in the kitchen. This proved a handy way to coordinate keeping foods chilled, cooking the hot foods, timing the warming of those foods in the food queue, and even providing a shopping list tied into the menu archive, and the family calendar, which is always visible on the door of the refrigerator. This was also great to avoid the previously inevitable, last minute return trips to the grocery for an item that didn’t make it on the old paper grocery lists. Now we could take remote inventory from the store, to make sure we really had walnuts for the dressing or enough whipping cream for the pie.

Once the big day came, we could actually sit back for the first time, and just wait for last minute evite® updates on arrival times. Granted, as James Gunter points out in his law enforcement blog post, Twitter is Not the Holy Grail of Emergency Notification, using Twitter alone as an alarm system is dangerous, but if only the turkey is at state, this may be sufficient. With our Twitter early warning system tied into the day’s calendar on our refrigerator, we were notified, in order, that: our oldest son and girlfriend were on their way; younger son and new grandchildren would be slightly delayed, due to a diaper change; our daughter’s friends would have to make a stop to pick something up on the way; and my old law firm partner and family would be here “soon.”

“Soon” always had a special meaning for my old partner’s arrival, but having done an earlier blog post on the Twitter Geoloction API, I had convinced him to start “tweeting.” With a little advanced coordination, I was able to tell they had not left home yet, was alerted when they started to move in our direction, and a new ETA appeared next to their family avatar on our handy refrigerator/server/message center. Our voice recognition system and data-to speech-program even announced that guests were arriving, making those already inside our “smart house” feel like they were early guests at a presidential ball, where dignitaries are announced as they enter. This was particularly helpful in marshalling the troops to help get the new twins inside before the fresh air woke them up.

Really Cool, New Sixth-Sense Technology was the pride and joy of my new system, even if it was still a beta version. The cobbled aggregation consists of off-the-shelf, Web cam, portable battery-powered 3-D projection system, and other devices connected to the user’s cell phone. The system’s ability to project keypads and other tools onto any surface, to make it a device like those used by Tom Cruise in Minority Report, proved very helpful in the game room. The RFID tracking system allowed us to locate the kids who were tardy in departure from the media room, turning down the heat in that room during dinner, and returning them to the appropriate spot in the movie they were watching upon their return.

We were able to use all this technology to time when dinner started, so the parents of the little kids enjoyed the rare treat of being able to eat in relative peace, coordinating with nap and infant feeding schedules for that optimal state of “joyfulness” promised by the appliance company. It also allowed us to finish before the preselected football games appeared on the adult’s monitors, cartoons came up for the tikes, and video games for the rest of the younger kids.

The great meal now being history, we can review the video record of the whole event to work on ways to improve it for next year. Using the facial recognition and identification system, we can piece together the level of “joyfulness” for each family member and guest, item-by-item, and plug these back into project software to start planning next year’s event.

The transportation alert module paid off in the first year, letting my oldest son and girlfriend know the system was well on the way to rerouting them back to Chicago, due to a snow storm interrupting their original plans to fly back into O’Hare. The placemats, inspired by some iPhone apps, allowed us to check just how much food each family member and guest had consumed, and for those who desired it, their iPhone apps would now “remind” them of the exercise plan the system had outlined to return them to normal size, including, of course, the appropriate level of play on their Wii Fit™ system at home.

Apologies to Berners Lee, whose article, The Semantic Web, in a 2001 edition of Scientific American, gave rise to this story. Lucy, in the original story, instructed her Semantic Web agent through her handheld Web browser to conduct a search which started to define the term, Web 3.0.

That’s what I think. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.

If you are really interested, I just started yet another free group on LinkedIn, Social Media Search and Forensics. Many of these articles and discussion about them are posted there. Please join us.

Great post, I’d like to know if “That meant we had to get out the extra leaf for the dining room table” went as smoothly as all the digital integration as usually I can’t find my extra leafs and then can’t figure how they worked until another glass of red has been consumed.